During the third and fourth centuries Christianity
spread to the major urban centers of Asia, and in the
fifth century to China. These small Christian commu-
nities barely brushed shoulders with the Buddhist faith,
but even this contact came to an end with the outbreak
of PERSECUTIONSin the late Tang dynasty against all
foreign religions. From the tenth to the sixteenth cen-
turies, barbarian invasions in Europe and the advance
of Islam would erect more formidable barriers between
the West and Asia, further limiting the possibility of
Buddhist–Christian interaction.
Late Middle Ages and Renaissance
Travelers from Europe in the thirteenth century, such
as Giovanni de Piano Carpini and William of Ruys-
broeck, were the first to send back to Europe reports
of Buddhism as a religion whose scriptures, doctrine,
saints, monastic life, meditation practices, and rituals
were comparable to those of Christianity. Records of
the voyages of Marco Polo from 1274 to 1295 include
expressions of admiration for the religion and men-
tion Buddha as a saintly figure lacking only the grace
of baptism. During the next fifty years Christian monks
like Giovanni de Montecorino (in 1289), Odorico da
Pordenone (from 1318 to 1330), and Giovanni Marig-
nolli (from 1338 to 1353) traveled more widely and
confirmed the unity of the Buddhist faith around Asia.
Mention should also be made of the legend of Bar-
laam and Josaphat, a story of uncertain authorship but
popularized through an eleventh-century Greek trans-
lation. It tells of Josaphat, an Indian prince, convert-
ing to Christianity under the guidance of the monk
Barlaam. So beloved did the story become that the two
saints were eventually accepted into the Roman mar-
tyrology. Only around the middle of the nineteenth
century was the hoax uncovered: Josaphat was a re-
casting of the Prince Siddhartha based on the first-
century biography of the Buddha. The saints were not
removed from the liturgical calendar, however, until
the middle of the twentieth century.
Many of the first Catholic missionaries to arrive in
Asia in the sixteenth century sent home idyllic accounts
of Buddhism. Among them was Francis Xavier, whose
direct contact with Buddhist monks and scholars in
Japan from 1549 to 1551 opened the way for succes-
sors to study Buddhism in greater depth. Relying on
their reports, the French orientalist Guillaume Postel
in 1552 ventured to call Buddhism “the greatest reli-
gion in the world.” Reading his words, missionaries in
Goa on the coast of India concluded that the Gospel
must have been preached in these lands already,
though its truth dimmed over the centuries by the
darkness of sin.
This was one side of the picture. When Vasco da
Gama and the Portuguese colonizers came to Ceylon,
now Sri Lanka, in 1505, they confiscated Buddhist
properties across the land, with the full cooperation of
the Christian missionaries. During the seventeenth and
eighteenth centuries the Dutch continued the sup-
pression. Elsewhere, when Matteo Ricci entered China
in 1583 he quickly forsook his interest in Buddhism
for Confucianism, rejecting the former as an inferior
religion and its monks as the dregs of Chinese society.
His contemporaries Michele Ruggeri and Alessandro
Valignano—as indeed did the majority of missionaries
in China for centuries to come—concurred.
In THERAVADAlands, the missionaries were often
more positive. In seventeenth-century Thailand a
number of French priests actually lived in Buddhist
monasteries. The century before, in Burma, several
missionaries had written tracts favorable to Buddhism.
In Cambodia there are records of a similarly positive
approach, though it is Giovanni Maria Leria who is
better remembered for his bitter hatred of the religion,
rejecting Buddhism as a deliberate wile of the devil to
transform all that is beautiful in Christianity. His views
were to become the norm that held throughout most
of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. An excep-
tion is Paul Ambrose Bigandet, bishop of Rangoon
from 1854 to 1856, who mediated an exchange of let-
ters between the DALAILAMAand Pope Clement XII
in which the latter recognized Buddhism as “leading
to the happiness of eternal life.”The modern age
It is only with the arrival of Sanskrit studies in Europe
in the late eighteenth century and the subsequent avail-
ability of Buddhist texts that one can speak of a proper
encounter in the West with Buddhism. Esteem for its
tenets and practices grew apace, and the end of the cen-
tury saw the first examples of Westerners converting
to Buddhism and even entering the monastic life. Bud-
dhist associations were formed in Germany, England,
and later in the United States. Monks accompanying
emigrants from several Asian lands to the Americas
gave additional strength to the presence of Buddhism
in the West.
The World Parliament of Religions held in Chicago
in 1893 symbolized the change in attitude that had
taken place in the Christian world, though not with-CHRISTIANITY ANDBUDDHISM